The Chemickal Marriage

the knife from her boot and sliced open the first envelope. The red paper was stiffer than it appeared. Inside was only a snip of newsprint, by the typeface recognizably from the
Herald
.
–grettable Canvases from Paris, whose
Rococo
Opulence languishes in a mire of degenerate Imagination. The largest, abstrusely entitled
The Chemickal Marriage
, happily eschews the odious, irreligious Satire of Mr Veilandt’s recent
Annunciation
, but the only Union on display is that of Arrogance and Debauchery. The Composition’s Bride, if one can bear to thus describe a Figure so painstakingly degraded
    Miss Temple had seen the artist’s work and did not dispute the assessment, though she did not know this particular piece. That the decadent artist Oskar Veilandt and the Comte d’Orkancz were one and the same was not widely known, for Veilandt was supposed to have died in Paris some years before. If she could acquire the entire article from the
Herald
, she would certainly learn more.
    Miss Temple took up the second envelope, heavier than the first, and cutalong its seam. She peeked inside and felt her breath catch. With delicate care she drew the blade around the next two sides, peeling it open as fearfully as if it were a box that held a beating heart.
    The envelope had been pinned to the door quite deliberately to avoid damaging the small square of glass it held – no thicker than a wasp’s wing, and the colour of indigo ink pooled across white porcelain. She glanced at the door. This had come from the Contessa. The glass might hold anything – degrading, deranging, unthinkable – and to look inside would be as irrevocable as leaping from a rooftop. Her parched throat tasted of black ash … the Comte’s memories told her that the thinness of the glass allowed only the simplest inscription, that the memory must be brief.
    The skin on the back of her neck tingled. Miss Temple forced her eyes around the room, as if cataloguing its reality might give her strength. She looked into the glass.
    Two minutes later – she glanced at once to the clock – Miss Temple had pulled her eyes free. Her face was flushed, yet her transit of the glass fragment had not been difficult: the captured memory was but the viewing of a roll of parchment … the architectural plan of a building she did not know.
    The Contessa had wasted her strategic advantage to acquaint Miss Temple, an
enemy
, with an unhelpful newspaper clipping and an equally pointless map. Obviously each
might
be useful, if she knew what they meant … but why would the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza desire Miss Temple to become even
more
entangled in her business?
    Taking into account the curiosity of maids, Miss Temple hid the clipping and glass square beneath a feathered hat she never wore. The red envelopes were left in plain sight on her desktop, each now containing arbitrary swatches of newsprint.
    The night brought only a terse note from Mr Pfaff: ‘Glassworks engaged, following on.’ Because Ramper and Jaxon passed messages through Pfaff, she heard nothing from either man, and Pfaff himself sent no further word that morning nor the next entire day. Miss Temple strode through the hotel, to her meals, to the cellar, even once on a whim to the rooftop in hopes of spying the brown-coated man in the street. She saw nothing, and clumpedback to the red-flocked corridor of the topmost floor, where Mr Brine stood waiting.
    At her chambers the evening editions had arrived and lay on the sideboard. Miss Temple took the pile in both hands and retreated to her writing desk, holding the papers on her lap without looking at them.
    The journey to Harschmort House was a matter of hours by train, somewhat more by coach, and perhaps as much as an entire day on foot. Mr Jaxon had been gone five days, and Mr Ropp above a fortnight. That both had vanished into the mystery of Harschmort confirmed that Robert Vandaariff
had
survived. If the brown-coated man served Vandaariff, did it not mean, upon his trailing Ramper, that Ramper would disappear as well?
    The Contessa had found her. She was wasting time. Her enemies were moving.
    Miss Temple shoved the papers onto the floor. The sun was setting. She sorted through her bag. She could wait no more.
    ‘Marie, my travelling jacket.’
    The maid had been safely installed in the room Miss Temple kept for business, the hotel’s footmen within earshot of the door. Miss Temple again left through the kitchens, Mr Brine at her side. With no idea